Jeffrey Wells Yesterday some Facebook entity representing Joni Mitchell posted an attractive photo of the fabled singer-poet, taken in ‘83. The comments were adoring but shamelessly so — a torrent of rapt, falsetto-voiced religious worship. I tried to point this out, and of course my remarks drew scorn.
“Past Mitchell Capturings,” posted on 7.20.19:.
Sam Spade to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “Don’t be silly. You’re taking the fall.”
Ever thus to trans ideologues! Bud Light marketing vp Alissa Heinerscheid has paid the price for her terrible woke folly.
There are many HE commenters who called the Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney thing a tempest in a teapot. They are now anxiously in search of tall grass. If they were men they would admit their error, but of course they won’t. Three of them are named below — one of them is Pete Miesel.
What more is there to learn or say about the poor guy? I can’t imagine what new wrinkles have yet to be considered…seriously. Even when I was a kid I knew Hudson was closeted. I had a surreal dream about him when I was 12 or 13, and I just knew.
In the vicinity of the Colisseum, street peddlers have been selling this Roma Antica map to the tourists for decades. I bought mine (tightly rolled and shrink-wrapped) in ‘07, and for a good 15 years it hung on my dining room wall, mounted and framed.
I am eternally of this ancient city, or so I’ve always believed in my bones (or at least in my dreams). I actually lived there, I’m fairly certain, in one of my past lives. And what a comedown my lives have been ever since.
“So as through a glass, and darkly / the age-long strife I see / Where I’ve written and travelled in many guises, many names / But always me”
Dumbest, funniest MAGA moron fantasy, etc. Straight or satirical…doesn’t matter.
The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination will be upon us before we know it (concurrent, by the way, with the 11.22.23 opening of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) and I’m asking myself something.
Why after all this time has no one ever suggested that Lenny Bruce may have been on to something when he suggested that Jackie Kennedy was simply, immediately terrified about being shot herself (as anyone would be) and was following a blind instinct to avoid a similar death by getting the hell away from the line of fire by climbing out of the back seat and onto the limousine trunk?
That has always seemed to me like a very natural and default kneejerk response — haul ass in order to save your own terrified, freaked-out ass.
And yet every last person who’s ever analyzed what happened during those fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza…they ALL say she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown onto the trunk. And maybe she was, but why has no one ever suggested that Bruce’s interpretation was at the very least a reasonable possibility?
If so, Jackie wasn’t behaving in some cowardly or ignoble fashion. She’d just seen half of JFK’s head — very close, only inches away — explode into blood and skull and brain matter and vapor — soaking her gloves bright red and all that cranial flotsam spraying upon her own face. Naturally she came to a split-second realization that she might be next and immediately thought about saving herself from a similar fate and, not incidentally, staying alive in order to care for her two children.
Would that have been such a terrible instantaneous reaction?
I know the ruins of Rome’s ancient Circus Maximus quite well. This is where all the chariot races happened, of course, and where, according to the script of Ben-Hur, Charlton Heston rode to victory several times while he was still bunking at Jack Hawkins’ palazzo, prior to returning to Judea.
The great Circus Maximus differed from Jerusalem’s chariot-race stadium (where Heston competed and won with Stephen Boyd being dragged and stomped to death) in one highly significant way. The large oval Jerusalem racetrack had a huge centerpiece structure, ornamented by huge bronze sculptures of four kneeling warriors.
The Roman stadium, by all accounts, had no centerpiece or middle island, or at least none that obstructed views of the races.
And that’s the logic problem with the Jerusalem stadium, to wit: most of the spectators, or those sitting on either side of the massive center structure, can’t see the other side of the racetrack. And that includes Frank Thring’s Pontius Pilate and other elite Roman royals who attended the Judah Ben-Hur-vs.-Messala race on that fateful day. They were only able to see one half of the damn track, which of course makes no sense from any perspective, including that of the stadium architect.
What was the Ben–Hur production designer thinking? I’ll tell you what he was thinking. He was thinking two things: (1) The huuge center island with the four huge kneeling guys looks cool, and (2) to hell with architectural logic.
